The lamp was in motion. It was done. And as it flew across the room, Eva realized what kind of mother she was. She was the kind of mother who could throw a lamp across the room. Since when? How long had they been that family? As soon as she did it, she pressed back hard against the kitschy ivory and marigold yellow wallpaper and slid to the floor with her knee up to her eye socket and just sat there, wilted. There was nothing to say. What do you say after something like that? She wasn’t the kind who would know. In the timeline of Eva’s life, this year had gone from the year she got disbarred right as her daughter’s first college tuition payment became due, to the year she threw her first lamp at someone. First lamp, because she didn’t feel certain that it would not happen again. Beau wasn’t home from his after school job yet, but there was still all sorts of furniture left to be thrown. She wouldn’t want him to feel left out. When she looked up, Jenny was gone and the door was wide open. Her eyes felt raw and stung and she rubbed them ceaselessly, manically. She sidestepped the sofa table made from a custom surfboard. The one given to her by one of her flings from back in the days when her skin never burned from the sun. Some leftover, pink lipstick-stained, to-go coffee lids slipped from it onto the revolting brownish orange shag carpet. She lingered in the open doorway, taking a long look down both sides of the street, looking for Jenny. Several porch lights turned on. Since they’d moved from Paso Robles Drive to the part of town littered with endless condos, all peppered in shades of white and tan and looking offensively similar, she had felt constantly lost. And especially so at night. She saw the dingy white pick-up truck round the corner- Nico’s truck. And possibly for the first time in her life, felt relief that her daughter wasn’t right beside her. She gently closed the door. Reaching for a drink of her Benedictine and brandy, she shook her head slowly until her her usual platinum, Marilyn-esque hair floated around her like a ravaged cotton ball.

Jenny walked out the door into a heat-hazy kind of evening. The mission clay rooftops of the courthouse all the way down to Bath street had a warm hue to them. And the way the sunlight faded into that hazy purple dusk, the way that only California can, made her feel like she was the first person to ever see it and the only one to ever walk straight into it the way she did. She walked a block past the gaudy tile fountain till she got to the complex’s front gates. And there was Nico’s filthy pick-up truck. He’d just gotten off work and she could see the hot pink headband he wore like a crown to tame his thick Italian hair. She wasn’t thinking about Eva or Beau, or anyone really, except herself and the way she felt and the things she wanted to do and the way she wanted to feel that night regardless of what it meant tomorrow.

Nico and Jenny drove down to the coastline that night when they heard there was a young gray whale sighted in the harbor. The American Riviera had night cycles just like cities twice it’s size. It was that sweet hour just late enough, or early enough, that all the bars had long since closed. In the next hour of two, landscapers would begin their meticulous daily upkeep of the Fess Parker gardens, housekeepers and hotel staff would start their early morning commutes from less-glamourous nearby towns, and college kids would sneak out of strangers apartments and drive groggily home to shower before their roommates woke up. It was not uncommon, when walking down State street with it’s sprawling Spanish colonial designed shopping plazas and pristine botanical gardens,to see perfectly manicured women flood from the backseat of a black Mercedes and push hurriedly past small, beautiful brown children with snot trails running down their faces in the middle of the street. But it was that precious, unclaimed hour. The hour after the rich retire to their villas having thoroughly exhausted the city’s night life but before the poor began the tireless undertaking of quietly maintaining the illusion. It was the hour when the city belonged to no one at all.

Nico drove his truck into the sand and they both sat in the bed of it while he smoked a cigarette and she just talked and talked, waiting to see the whale or even just some bubbles where it could have been.

“So tell me about that, Jenny.”
“Hmm…What?”
“Well, you’re always going on about how you’re some kind of bad person, so tell me about it. I’d like to know. Tell me about the first moment in your life where you just knew you were bad.”
“You really think it works like that?”
“Well, it does for me.” He shirked out of his teal blue windbreaker and balled it up behind his head like a pillow.
“I don’t know how to answer that! I was just talking at you…I had no idea you were actually listening.” She laughed at the smoke in the air and his attempt to say the right thing or to know her, or to think that a question like that could really help you know anyone.
“I guess, to me, there’s just something romantic about calling a spade a spade.” She tugged at the windbreaker behind his head to make extra room and casually placed her head beside his.
At that, Nico raised an eyebrow.
“I just don’t know how to say it make it sound real to you. Even now, you’re smiling like at any minute I’m going to ask you where we’re ‘going’ and I just can’t tell you enough that I don’t want to go a single place with you.”
He started looking down at his hands. He kept rubbing them on his cut off jeans. She smiled and pulled the cigarette from his lips, taking the last few drags for herself.
“I don’t want you to tell me where you’re going, or how I’m coming along, because as soon as you do that’s the last place I’ll want to go!” She flicked the cigarette down into the sand.
“I guess I’m just trying to tell you that I just know I’m not the right kind of girl…. or any kind at all.”
“Jenny Lee: Bad Person.” He gave a small small smile towards his feet.
“That’s right. So stop smiling at me like this is all some kind of game I’m playing when really I’ll be picking out your curtains tomorrow morning. You’re not in the picture unless you are, like you are right now, this moment.”
She accidentally touched his hand, a gesture he misunderstood as warmth.
“But tomorrow morning you’re somewhere off-scene just like I am for you.”
“I am for you too, Jenny Lee.”
“Jesus, Nico.”
“I am.”
“You’re for nobody. Not yet. You’re for you and that’s the way it has to be.”
His jaw got sharper and he started winding things up inside. His eyes were always stormy and grey and his thin lips disappeared altogether.
“Move in with me,” he said to an empty truck bed.
“Come ON!” She yelled back at him. He heard a distant laugh. She had already hopped out of the truck and had taken off running barefoot down the beach. She felt a rush like the first time you stand up after a few drinks. Had she really seen it? They came all the way down here but she never thought they’d catch a glimpse.
“Woah! HEY! What’s so funny, huh?” He ran to catch up to her. She was standing completely still staring at the ocean. He grabbed her thin arm and whipped her towards him.
“What? You think because I smoke Marlboros and mow your neighbors lawns that I’m just going to knock you up and ruin everything?”
Silence.
“Yeah, I don’t think the right things, or smoke the right things or read anything at all. But you’re no better off that me! You just don’t know that yet.” He stood up straighter and flailed his arms at her, causing some nearby gulls to scatter.
“Your devotion to whatever bullshit life you think you’re living doesn’t mean you get to blow off how I want to live, you know.”
“I don’t think any of that at all.”
“Well, good! Because fuck that.”
“Nico.. I”
“And another thing! Another thing while I’m the one talking…I’m not going to apologize for wanting something anymore. Yeah, I want something and maybe it’s cliche and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, but here it is. Here is my six years of inconveniently wanting you. It’s on the table and it’s getting cold so excuse yourself or fucking feast on it, alright? Just quit whatever it is we’re doing now.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s for sure.”

He stood there for a moment watching her. Now was one of those moments he needed another sign. If she would just press her flat palm against his, or kiss him, really kiss him, he could take it all back. He stood there expectantly but she didn’t move or look at him. The light from the buoys was just enough to keep the water from looking black. She watched it play off a vast stretch of unsettled water, hinting at what, only moments ago, could have been there. So close to this moment she was in now that if she closed her eyes, maybe she could go back and see it for sure. But every passing second felt less magical. And she knew they’d really missed something.